Shortfall signalsA B C D E F G H IJKL M N O P R S T U VXYZWimprovements at Levels B and C.
Shannon and Weaver stressed the importance
of redundancy in telephonic communica-
tion, that is the practice of inserting words,
salutations, phrases, expressions not strictly
relevant to the central message. Such a practice,
conducted by all of us in everyday conversation,
serves a vital purpose. As far as exchanges on
the telephone are concerned, Shannon and
Weaver estimated that as much as 50 per cent
of the conversation can be lost, say as a result of
crackle on the line, yet the gist of the message
would still be understood. See channel capac-
ity; cybernetics. See also topic guide under
communication models.
Shawcross Commission Report on the Press
(UK), 1962 The five-member Commission
chaired by Lord Shawcross, lawyer and former
Labour minister, declared that the real enemy of
good-quality newspapers was competition; and
competition threatened diversity. ‘Within any
class of competitive newspapers,’ said the Report,
‘the economies of large-scale operation provide a
natural tendency for a newspaper which already
has a large circulation to fl ourish, and to attract
still more readers, whilst a newspaper which has
a small circulation is likely to be in diffi culties.’
Shawcross off ered no radical solution to the
problems his Committee had delineated, trust-
ing in the free market, albeit reluctantly: ‘Th ere
is no acceptable legislative or fi scal way of regu-
lating the competitive and economic forces so as
to ensure a suffi cient diversity of newspapers.’
Th e Report put forward an idea for a press
amalgamations court which should scrutinize
proposed mergers of all daily or Sunday papers
with sales over 3 million, and to give the go-ahead
only if the court considered such mergers to be of
no threat to public interest. In 1965 the Monopo-
lies Commission was created by the Labour
government under Harold Wilson, by means of
the Monopolies and Mergers Act, which ruled
that issues were to be decided by government,
not the courts. See topic guide under commis-
sions, committees, legislation.
‘Shock-jocks’ See radio: ‘shock jocks’.
Shortfall signals In interpersonal contact, a
shortfall signal is, for example, a smile of greeting
that disappears too soon; in other words it fails
to carry conviction as a true smile of greeting. In
the main, shortfall signals consist of simulated
warmth in salutation. Th e evasive glance, the
pulled-away glance, the frozen smile, the smile
of mouth without eyes – all of these and many
more are indicators of personal unease about
the encounter.Sexism Discrimination against people on the
grounds of assumed diff erences in their qualities,
behaviours and characteristics resulting from
their sex. Such discrimination may be targeted
against men as well as women, but generally
women are seen as its main victims. Sexism
may manifest itself in an individual as a form of
prejudice or bigotry, but more fundamentally
concern focuses on the degree to which such
discrimination is embedded within the structure
and language of a society. In this respect the role
that the media may play in generating or perpet-
uating this discrimination has been a theme of
considerable recent research. See feminism;
gender; male-as-norm; pornography;
stereotype. See also topic guides under
gender matters; media issues & debates.
S4C Th e Welsh counterpart of channel 4 (UK)
- Saniel Pedwar Cymru. Approximately half the
channel’s output is in Welsh to serve the 500,000
Welsh-speakers in Wales.
Shadowing See cocktail party problem.
Shannon and Weaver’s model of commu-
nication, 1949 Developed by Claude Shannon
and Warren Weaver to assist the construction
of a mathematical theory of communication
which could be applied in a wide variety of
information-transfer situations, whether by
humans, machines or other systems. It is
essentially a linear, process-centred model in
which an information source is conveyed by a
transmitter (communicator) by means of a signal
to a receiver, the activity being subject to a ‘noise
source’ (interference).
Shannon and Weaver were engineers working
for the Bell Telephone Laboratories in the US
and their objective was to ensure maximum
efficiency of the channels of communication,
in their case telephone cable and radio wave.
However, in Mathematical Th eory of Commu-
nication (University of Illinois Press, 1949), they
claim for their theory a much wider application
to human communication than solely the techni-
cal one.
Within the framework of their model of
transmission, the authors identify three levels
of problems in the analysis of communication:
Level A (technical); Level B (semantic – the
meaning as emanating from the Transmitter’s
mode of address); and Level C (effectiveness
in terms of reception or understanding on the
part of the Receiver). Shannon and Weaver’s
model was constructed mainly to tackle Level A
problems, and the assumption seems to be that
to sort out the technical problems by improv-
ing encoding will, almost automatically, lead to